Bajaur attack

Fifty-four lives lost, nearly a hundred injured, a party attacked, a region reeling – once again – under terror. The story is two days old but also decades old now for a country that has paid in blood for terror that just doesn’t go away, terror that has been a direct consequence of decades of bad policymaking. The police say that the Sunday attack on a JUI-F political convention in Bajaur was a suicide bomb, the JUI-F Khar tehsil head, general secretary Nawagai tehsil and district secretary information among those who lost their lives. This is the fourth suicide attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in July, but the previous three targeted security personnel – and were likely TTP attacks. This is where our terror threat gets complicated, and dangerous. Sunday’s bombing has been claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), a branch of the Islamic State which centres itself in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the ISKP has taken on the Afghan Taliban, seeing them as not ‘strict enough’ in their enforcement of religious edicts. The group has been thought to have targeted a number of individuals in Afghanistan. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IGP Hayat Khan has said that there were threats in the Bajaur area for quite some time due to the presence of the ISKP. and the area administration had refused to give permission for the JUI-F rally due to the threats, but the local leadership insisted on holding it. The ISKP has not hidden its targeting of the JUI-F, criticizing the party for being close to the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan government.

It may not eventually matter which group has carried out the attack. Pakistan is facing a threat from multiple extremist militants – the TTP and the ISKP the more virulent forms of terrorism we are dealing with. No matter which militant group carried it out, this attack or any attack is obviously spurred by hatred. Whatever the different tactics various militant groups may adopt, they are united by a common ideology of hate that brings in everyone from minorities to right-wing politicians and the security forces. No one is safe from their wrath. This is why the government needs to stop treating different militant groups in different ways. With the ISKP posing an even bigger danger – if that is possible – than the TTP, the Pakistani state has to come up with a strategy fast. This is particularly so since the IS as a militant group has a modus operandi quite different to that of the TTP – being more diffused, and preferring to have a decentralized structure with individual units and sometimes even lone wolves acting under its name.

For their part, the Afghan Taliban have condemned the Bajaur blast. What we need now on that front is clear and complete cooperation for the Afghans as far as terrorism goes. And on our front, we need a complete buy-in for the National Action Plan that has been waiting to be fully implemented in the country – no ifs and buts. The IS, more than any previous militant group, relies on attracting support through social media and other forms of propaganda. We need to counter this message. At the same time, a stronger intelligence effort is needed to disrupt the ISKP all over the country – while not forgetting the TTP in the process. This has to be a multiple-pronged approach. With the examples of countries like Syria and Iraq showing how the IS is a group that can rapidly multiply if it is allowed to operate unchecked, we really cannot afford any coplanceny here.